Most jazz fans know that pianist Thelonious Monk and the saxophonist John Coltrane played together briefly in Monk's quartet in 1957. Coltrane had left Miles Davis's quintent in April due in part to Coltrane's herion addiction, and during the summer and fall of that year Coltrane played often with Monk while Coltrane kicked his habit. Coltrane recorded a few tunes with Monk that year; the recordings were assembled and released on the Riverside Label as Thelonius Monk With John Coltrane. Among jazz lovers, these recordings are prized; Monk is at the peak of his powers, and Coltrane was in an interesting transitional period and is pushed and prodded by Monk to go in all sorts of fascinating directions.

Unfortunately, that one album was the only one Monk and Coltrane made when they were together. The two played together all summer at a New York club called the Five Spot, but no one made a professional recording of the live gigs. Until recently, the only other known recording of Monk and Coltrane together was a recording made by Coltrane's wife one night at the Five Spot using a portable tape recorder and a single mike. It was released in 1993 by Blue Note and is still available as Live at the Five Spot — Discovery! The music is just marvelous, and very much worth getting, but the recording quality is dismal.

The big news in the jazz world — and the explanation for the title of this post — is that on September 27, Blue Note will be releasing the entire recording of a newly discovered concert with Monk and Coltrane playing together. The recordings were discovered this January in a way that seems straight out of a movie. It turns out that Monk and Coltrane appeared together at a Carnegie Hall benefit concert on November 29, 1957. The appearance was recorded by Voice of America, but everyone forgot about the recording:

The tapes from that evening at Carnegie Hall were inadequately labeled, filed away amongst the Voice of America's vast collection of recordings, and apparently forgotten until January 2005 when Larry Applebaum, a supervisor and jazz specialist at the Library of Congress, came upon them by accident during the routine process of digitally transferring the Library's collection for preservation purposes. Applebaum noticed a set of tapes simply labeled "sp. Event 11/29/57 carnegie jazz concert (#1)," with one of the tapes barring the sole marking "T. Monk."

It's a good story, yes, but what about the music? Well, Blue Note recently made two cuts available on its website for free — Monk's Mood and Evidence. Listen to them yourself. The music is fantastic, and unlike the earlier known recording, the sound quality is terrific. In a review of the entire album in the New York Sun, Will Friedwald suggests that the rest of the CD is even better:

. . . [T]he new concert, which amounts to nine tracks and 51 fantastic minutes of music, is a goldmine. This is the kind of CD that will immediately start turning up on top-10 lists, not only for 2005 but for all time. In the same way that "Kind of Blue" showcases four giants - Miles Davis, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, and Bill Evans - in top form, this is a glimpse of two legends at their best. . . . The music is spectacular - not just as good as the sum of its considerable parts, but even better.

Blue Note has also produced a terrific 8:25 minute video about the album and its discovery that is available here (click on "Promotional EPK Stream").

UPDATE: I should also point out, for the sake of completeness, that Coltrane also joins Monk on the version of "Monk's Mood" that appears on Thelonious Himself.

Orin,
There is another great jazz release this week: Sonny Rollins at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston on 9/15/2001. Sonny made it to Boston out of NYC, although he lived 6 blocks from the WTC and witnessed the attacks. The amazing story of how this album made it from a bootleg tape to CD is documented in this Boston Globe story:

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2005/08/28/wired/

I was at the concert, and it was Sonny at his best (as he turns 75 this September, this will be one of his last masterworks). The emotions in the room were overwhelming, and although they only released half the concert on a single CD (if you wonder why the music business is collapsing, look no further than the logic of not simply releasing this as a double album) this should be in every jazz listener's collection, not only as an amazing musical evening, but as a time capsule from a period that in some ways seems so far away today.